[22] The same point comes out in Mr. Bradley’s treatment of the way in which the practical demand for the good or satisfaction is to be taken account of in a philosophical conception of the nature of reality. He admits that it comes in; but holds that it enters not directly, but because if left outside it indirectly introduces a feature of “discontent” on the intellectual side (see p. 155). This, as an argument for the supremacy of the isolated theoretical standard, loses all its force if we cease to conceive of intellect as from the start an independent function, and realize that intellectual discontent is the practical conflict becoming deliberately aware of itself as the most effective means of its own rectification.
[23] This suggests that many of the stock arguments against pragmatism fail to take its contention seriously enough. They proceed from the assumption that it is an account of truth which leaves untouched current notions of the nature of intelligence. But the essential point of pragmatism is that it bases its changed account of truth on a changed conception of the nature of intelligence, both as to its objective and its method. Now this different account of intelligence may be wrong, but controversy which leaves standing the conventionally current theories about thought and merely discusses “truth” will not go far. Since truth is the adequate fulfilment of the function of intelligence, the question turns on the nature of the latter.
[24] Such a statement as, for example, Mr. Bradley’s (Mind, Vol. XIII., No. 51, N.S., p. 3, article on “Truth and Practice”) “The idea works ... but is able to work because I have chosen the right idea” surely loses any argumentative force it may seem to have, when it is recalled that, upon the theory argued against, ability to work and rightness are one and the same thing. If the wording is changed to read “The idea is able to work because I have chosen an idea which is able to work” the question-begging character of the implied criticism is evident. The change of phraseology also may suggest the crucial and pregnant question: How does any one know that an idea is able to work excepting by setting it at work?
[25] A paper read in the spring of 1909 before the Philosophical Club of Smith College and not previously published.
[26] Read as the Presidential Address at the fifth annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association, at Cambridge, December 28, 1905, and reprinted with verbal revisions from the Philosophical Review, Vol. XV., March, 1906. The substitution of the word “Existences” for the word “Realities” (in the original title) is due to a subsequent recognition on my part that the eulogistic historic associations with the word “Reality” (against which the paper was a protest) infected the interpretation of the paper itself, so that the use of some more colorless word was desirable.
[27] Since writing the above I have read the following words of a candidly unsympathetic friend of philosophy: “Neither philosophy nor science can institute man’s relation to the universe, because such reciprocity must have existed before any kind of science or philosophy can begin; since each investigates phenomena by means of the intellect, and independent of the position and feeling of the investigator; whereas the relation of man to the universe is defined, not by the intellect alone, but by his sensitive perception aided by all his spiritual powers. However much one may assure and instruct a man that all real existence is an idea, that matter is made up of atoms, that the essence of life is corporality or will, that heat, light, movement, electricity, are different manifestations of one and the same energy, one cannot thereby explain to a being with pains, pleasures, hopes, and fears his position in the universe.” Tolstoi, essay on “Religion and Morality,” in “Essays, Letters, and Miscellanies.”
[28] Hegel may be excepted from this statement. The habit of interpreting Hegel as a Neo-Kantian, a Kantian enlarged and purified, is a purely Anglo-American habit. This is no place to enter into the intricacies of Hegelian exegesis, but the subordination of both logical meaning and of mechanical existence to Geist, to life in its own developing movement, would seem to stand out in any unbiased view of Hegel. At all events, I wish to recognize my own personal debt to Hegel for the view set forth in this paper, without, of course, implying that it represents Hegel’s own intention.
[29] There will of course come in time with the development of this point of view an organon of beliefs. The signs of a genuine as against a simulated belief will be studied; belief as a vital personal reaction will be discriminated from habitual, incorporate, unquestioned (because unconsciously exercised) traditions of social classes and professions. In his “Will to Believe” Professor James has already laid down two traits of genuine belief (viz., “forced option,” and acceptance of responsibility for results) which are almost always ignored in criticisms (really caricatures) of his position. In the light of such an organon, one might come to doubt whether belief in, say, immortality (as distinct from hope on one side and a sort of intellectual balance of probability of opinion on the other) can genuinely exist at all.
[30] Reprinted, with slight verbal changes, from the Philosophical Review, Vol. XV. (1906).
[31] C. S. Peirce, Monist, Vol. XVI., p. 150.